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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: one, then the interest which attaches to these and similar unities and the
attempt which is made to divide them gives birth to a controversy.
PROTARCHUS: Of what nature?
SOCRATES: In the first place, as to whether these unities have a real
existence; and then how each individual unity, being always the same, and
incapable either of generation or of destruction, but retaining a permanent
individuality, can be conceived either as dispersed and multiplied in the
infinity of the world of generation, or as still entire and yet divided
from itself, which latter would seem to be the greatest impossibility of
all, for how can one and the same thing be at the same time in one and in
many things? These, Protarchus, are the real difficulties, and this is the
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